In a storage area network (SAN), a SAN management application monitors and manages manageable entities in the SAN. The manageable entities include storage arrays, connectivity devices, and hosts. Typically, software components known as agents execute on the hosts for gathering, reporting, and monitoring the manageable entities in the SAN. The manageable entities are responsive to the agents for reporting various status metrics back to the agents and receiving control information from the agents. A management server executes the SAN management application, and oversees the agents. The management server is responsive to a console having a graphical user interface (GUI) for receiving and displaying operator parameters with a SAN operator.
The SAN is therefore an interconnection of manageable entities operative to provide mass data storage and retrieval services to a user community. In the SAN, various data collection and reporting operations occur via the agents and the manageable entities the agents monitor. The data collection and reporting operations gather management information about the SAN. The management information is indicative of operating parameters, including but not limited to physical device usage, logical device allocation across physical devices, redundancy usage (mirroring, shadowing and RAID arrangements), available storage, used storage and archive/backup arrangements. Other types and usage of management information is employable by those skilled in the art of SAN management and control.